The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct in thinking the recipe Microsoft has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.

That would be Apple, of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in, and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.

For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight.

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Here is a video interview BoomTown did with Bob Visse, GM of MSN Product Management today at Microsoft’s offices in San Francisco.

The new MSN homepage debuts tonight with a redesign cutting clutter, adding the ability to access both Facebook and Twitter, a local focus and with Microsoft’s new Bing search service everywhere.

Also, some Microsoft interviews with MSN staff about the changes.

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In a week, the entire advertising sales staff of MySpace will gather at a swanky new seaside resort about 20 miles south of Los Angeles to get a first glimpse of the fresh direction the company is preparing to take under its new management.

The beleaguered social networking site has been in the midst of an effort to reinvigorate its image, spur innovation in its product and–most of all–pull itself out of a too-long slump, even as longtime rival Facebook has seen explosive growth.

On the possible agenda: A new strategy aimed at music and entertainment; a new look; and, perhaps, a new boss for the ad sales team.

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Tomorrow, Yahoo will officially unveil the latest redesign of its homepage, an almost complete rejiggering of the look and feel of one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.

The latest launch comes after about a half-dozen redesigns of the homepage since Yahoo was founded, the last one in 2006.

BoomTown thought it might be instructive to take a look at what has come before it, seeing how the Yahoo front page has evolved since 1994.

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This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition ”

Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there).

Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.

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Facebook CFO Gideon Yu is leaving Facebook, as the company announced internally today that it was replacing him and searching for a new CFO on the path to an eventual IPO.

The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the huge social-networking start-up was looking for a CFO with “public company experience.”

But several sources within the company said the departure was more due to an increasingly strained relationship between Yu and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over strategic disagreements about a wide range of issues, from increasing ad revenue to fund-raising discussions with investors.

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Facebook cried uncle this afternoon–but just a teeny, tiny, little bit–by announcing in a company blog that it had made tweaks to its recent redesign in response to massive user unhappiness over the changes.

We’re talking very tweaky, though, and not back-to-the-future stuff. As in, the new look is here to stay.

Nonetheless, the social-networking site also said it would give users more control via better filtering tools of the stream of information that Facebook has focused on making more prominent–and which some say makes the service look too much like a morbidly obese version of the hot microblogging site, Twitter.

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Late last night, Yahoo’s Tapan Bhat posted an update on the ongoing redesign of the Internet giant’s homepage, a massive undertaking given that 300 million people visit it each month.

Bhat, who is SVP of Yahoo’s Front Doors, Communities and Network Services, said the company was completing the first phase of its “bucket testing” and collecting feedback, but that, “Bottom line is we’re getting closer to the final design, but we’re not quite there yet.”

Indeed not, according to several sources at Yahoo, who said that the massive underhaul of the homepage has been a much more complex, much dicier effort and was taking a lot longer than expected to launch.

And, more importantly, new CEO Carol Bartz is also giving it the once-over.

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Yahoo will begin testing out versions of its new main homepage to a minuscule number of users starting tomorrow, employing a design that more significantly allows users to customize the starting page in a way that essentially amounts to a kind of My Yahoo-lite for everyone.

Making such a shift will also be a big perceptual deal for Yahoo, which needs to prove it has remained current and open, especially compared to faster-growing rivals like Facebook.

Thus, making a success of its new design is critical, and Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang has been touting the idea that Yahoo must be the “starting point” to the Web for users.

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Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

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